Roo Reynolds - What’s Next?

I’ve been hunting for a Mac equivalent to Windows Live Writer. Here’s my personal checklist/wishlist of what an offline blogging tool should do.

+ = yes
- = no (or if it’s there, I couldn’t find it)
[1] = ⌘+U (or Shift+⌘+U to use clipboard text and bypass the dialog)
[2] = ⌥+⌘+A (or Shift+⌘+A to use clipboard text and bypass the dialog)
[3] = Shift+⌘+L
[4] = Ctrl+K
[f] = with a little bit of fiddling
[e] = via HTML embed codes
[!] = really stupidly wonderfully easy
[w] = only in WYSIWYG mode, for some reason
[u] = Generally not too bad, but <span style=”font-style: italic;”> rather than <em>? Urgh.

Windows Live Writer is by far the best blogging tool I’ve ever used, but sadly it’s Windows only. It’s the benchmark by which I’m judging the others, but it would get big additional bonus points (if points were being given) for making it stupidly, wonderfully easy to insert Flickr photos and YouTube videos, without even needing to paste any HTML. Pasting in the URL for a Flickr photo / YouTube video into the editor is enough to make it do the right thing, which is a wonderful timesaving feature. The web preview auto-detects what your blog looks like, which makes an accurate preview trivially easy too.

Qumana is free, but a bit ‘monetized’ (there’s an Insert Ad button I have no interest in using, and the website says things like “Make money from your blog content by inserting the ads of your choice…”) but it’s nice enough. Each post automatically includes a “Powered by Qumana” link, which can be deleted by hand. The biggest problem with it is that alt+left/right doesn’t do anything, and instead you have to use ⌘+left/right to jump left/right by one word which is just wrong (or at least grossly inconsistent with every other Mac app I’ve ever used). Given my desire to use the keyboard for just about everything I do, this alone is a showstopper.

Ecto costs $17.95. Flickr support comes via a plugin, but sadly the output doesn’t follow the Flickr terms of service (the image should link to the photo page, but doesn’t until you add the link yourself). Rich text editing is nice though.

MarsEdit costs $29.95. It’s Flickr tab makes it very easy to add your own photos. No rich text editing but does have nice support for macros. If you don’t mind getting your hands dirty with some HTML, it’s great.

Depending on whether you like hacking HTML or really need a rich text editor, you’ll probably prefer MarsEdit or Ecto respectively. I’m enjoying MarsEdit enough to stick with it for now. I still have yet to find anything quite as nice as Windows Live Writer on the Mac though. Have I missed any?

• Acrylic | Times - “Times is a new type of newsreader for Mac OS X Leopard.” Beautiful. Could do with more customisation options, but it’s already very nice. [via:Jason Ellis]
• cityofsound: The Personal Well-Tempered Environment - “Essentially, the idea is for a system that makes previously invisible aspects of people’s behaviour visible, in order to help change individual and collective behaviour. “
• Twitter and the China earthquake - “Let’s see … whether this is the moment when Twitter comes of age as a platform which can bring faster coverage of a major news event than traditional media” First comment: “That moment came a while ago… This is probably the first one that you’ve seen”
• Comment is Free: Charlie Brooker on reviewing videogames - Charlie Brooker on GTA4
• Interview - Doctor Who: Top Trumps - Great opening question: “Doctor Who is TV show that deals with issues about the nature of humanity. Top Trumps is a numbers game based on limited skill and luck. Are you underselling the licence?”
• YouTube: BeatBearing demo - “A tangible rhythm sequencer. Ball bearings are used to trigger (Roland TR-808) drum sounds. Visual feedback is provided from a CRT display underneath to indicate the current time and the state of each beat.”
• AudioTouch - The project blog for “an Interactive Multi-user, Multi-touch Musical Table”

• IBM Social Computing Guidelines - “we turned to IBMers again to re-examine our guidelines and determine what needed to be modified. The effort has broadened the scope of the existing guidelines to include all forms of social computing.”
• sacha chua: The Gen Y Guide to Web 2.0 at Work - Sketched by Sacha on a DS
• Chronotron - Time travelling robots. Brilliant! Reviewed here
• YouTube - FaceBook In Reality - idiotsofants.com and BBC’sThe Wall - “POKE!”
• Open Tech 2008 - 5th July in London - “Open Tech 2008 is an informal, low cost one-day conference on technology, society and low-carbon living, featuring Open Source ways of working and technologies that anyone can have a go at”. Looks great. I’ve signed up.

• Boris Johnson Facts - “The writers of Lost asked Boris how they should end the series.” (after  chucknorrisfacts.com)
• NYT: Microsoft May Build A Copyright Cop Into Every Zune - “…the consumer wants there to be quality premium-produced content, and in order for that to continue to be a viable business, there needs to be significant protection around it”. Hmm.
• Prime Sense: Giving Machines a Prime Sense - “The Prime Sensor is a System on Chip (SoC) and a complete reference design for a three dimensional sensing and understanding device. … a standard image sensor, a light source, optical components and the Prime Sense IC which is the digital brain…”
• Wired.com: Home Tweet Home - Energy-Savvy House Broadcasts on Twitter - andy_house on Twitter gets a mention in the Wired Science blog. (I mentioned his project recently in a blog post about Tweetjects, but the Wired post is probably more exciting to him <grin>).
• Web 2.0 - Where is Technology Headed? (My recent presentation at MPI EMEC) - The (fairly basic, low-level introduction) presentation I recently gave on Web 2.0, backchannels and virtual worlds. It’s two hours long, including Q&A, and covers much of what I’ve been thinking about this year. Mainly aimed at web non-natives.
• microscopiq: Impossible Music Manipulation - Jason Ellis discovers an excellent video of Direct Note Access in an upcoming version of Melodyne “Imagine the kinds of new music games that could be built, making use of music the original developers never heard or even imagined” (I re-blogged this on Eightbar)
• Melodyne - “recognizes the music in an audio file and represents it directly as notes” When version 3 of the plugin comes out this autumn it will recognise notes within chords too. Nice.
• Hacking game controllers and 3D Wii | Technology | Guardian Unlimited - Bobbie’s writeup of this weekend’s Game Camp. (mattb is a hero)
• Cans festival - a set on Flickr - Was hoping to see this festival of street art on Saturday, but didn’t get a chance. Glad someone documented it.

• eco gadget shop: Current Cost monitor - “a device which receives information on electricity consumption from a transmitter attached to the domestic meter. The device then calculates the amount and cost of the electricity consumed” (in case you were wondering how to get hold of one)
• O’ReillyGMT: Speechification - “I can say categorically that Speechification is my favourite website of the moment!” (hurrah)
• ComputerWeekly.com IT Blog Awards 08 - ‘Help us to identify the best IT blogs in the UK … Web 2.0 and Business category. …for wide-ranging commentary across the Web 2.0 sphere, try Roo Reynolds … self-styled “UK-based Metaverse Evangelist, blogger and geek”‘ (also, hurrah)
• TrackThis: Track FedEx/UPS/USPS/DHL Packages using Twitter - “send a quick direct message to @trackthis and we’ll send you a direct message any time your package location changes.” Supports FedEx, UPS, USPS and DHL tracking codes.
• ROFLCon - “A group dissection of internet culture.” April 25th and 26th in Cambridge, MA. (looked simply amazing)
• pachube :: connecting environments, patching the planet - “Pachube, a service that enables people to tag and share real time environmental data from objects, devices and spaces around the world. The key aim is to facilitate interaction between remote environments, both physical and virtual.”
• Color Wars 2008 - “The world is our tether ball court. You can join anytime!”
• Married To The Sea: “The Champagne of Comics” - Married to the Sea is a simply brilliant web comic.
• ReLIVE08: Researching Learning in Virtual Environments conference - 20th and 21st November 2008 (am keynote speaking at this)
• the stribe - “The Stribe is an 8-channel multi-touch controller for music or video software.”
• RAD - Ruby Arduino Development - “RAD is a framework for programming the Arduino physcial computing platform using Ruby. RAD converts Ruby scripts written using a set of Rails-like conventions and helpers into C source code which can be compiled and run on the Arduino microcontroller.”
• russell davies: interesting2008 - Oh yes. Interesting 2007 was a blast. 21st of June, here we come. (Tickets are now sold out. Am hoping to get to speak at this. Something about Lego.)

Before there were blogjects, there were blobjects. In the closing speech at SIGGRAPH 2004, Bruce Sterling started by talking about blobjects, or blob-shaped consumer items.

Blobjects are the period objects of our time. They are the physical products that the digital revolution brought to the consumer shelf.

Sterling goes on (via ‘gizmos’, the current state of the art) to introduce spime.

At the moment, you are end-using Gizmos. My thesis here, my prophesy to you, is that, pretty soon, you will be wrangling Spimes.

This subject is covered more completely in his Shaping Things book, which is reviewed here by Cory Doctorow. Cory handily sums up Spime thus:

A Spime is a location-aware, environment-aware, self-logging, self-documenting, uniquely identified object that flings off data about itself and its environment in great quantities

Meanwhile, to fill the gap between blobjects and spime, we have blogjects. Julian Bleecker’s ‘Manifesto for Networked Objects — Cohabiting with Pigeons, Arphids and Aibos in the Internet of Things‘ introduces Blogjects, describing them as an “early ancestor” to spime. While spime is still speculative, Bleecker says

I can make Blogjects now because the semantics are immediately legible — objects, that blog. Tonight, I can go into my laboratory and begin to experiment with what a world might be like in which I co-occupy space with objects that blog.

Bleecker says there are three key characteristics of a blogject:

• Blogjects track and trace where they are and where they’ve been;
• Blogjects have self-contained (embedded) histories of their encounters and experiences
• Blogjects always have some form of agency — they can foment action and participate; they have an assertive voice within the social web.

The last point is important, and while he’s not expecting them to pass the Turing test, they need to interact. Good bloggers don’t ignore their comments; thats where most of the fun happens. In the same way, blogjects participate and converse both between themselves and with us.

The significance of the Internet of Things is not at all about instrumented machine-to-machine communication, or sensors that spew reams of data credit card transactions, or quantities of water flows, or records of how many vehicles passed a particular checkpoint along a highway. Those sensor-based things are lifeless, asocial recording instruments when placed alongside of the Blogject. … The social and political import of the Internet of Things is that things can now participate in the conversations that were previously off-limits to Things. … Things, once plugged into the Internet, will become agents that circulate food for thought, that “speak on” matters from an altogether different point of view, that lend a Thing-y perspective on micro and macro social, cultural, political and personal
matters.

If a blogject is an object that blogs, a tweetject is clearly an object that tweets (an intransitive verb: the act of using Twitter).

There are already lots of examples of objects using Twitter to interact with people, usually to report about the state of things in a convenient form. Botanicalls is an interesting project, aimed at “enhancing person-plant communication” using tools that can be used by people as well as plants. As a result, Pothos is a plant that knows when it needs watering (learn how to make your own).

Gareth Jones wrote about getting his laptop to tweet when Bluetooth devices come in and out of range. For a while that script was updating as gareth_laptop on Twitter. As long as some relevant mobile phones and laptops have Bluetooth enabled, there are some useful and interesting elements of personal presence detection here. Who is nearby? With some additional second-order agents running to work out what these devices are and what they mean (is Gareth at home? If he’s at work, who is nearby?).

Andy Stanford-Clark has an impressively complex home automation setup in his house on the Isle of Wight. It’s been online for a few years already, but has more recently been exposed via Twitter as andy_house. (Although Kelly raises bots as one of her Twitter pet peeves, she makes an exception for Andy’s house.) Andy also Twitter-enabled the Red Jet ferries which go to and from the Isle of Wight, where he lives.

There are many more tweetjects out there too.

There have been lots of weather bots on Twitter for a long time. Here’s one for Brighton and here are links to many more. Radio 1 is tweeting the playlist and summary information about listeners’ text messages. Mario Menti set up a lot more BBC bots too. Tom Morris hooked the various London tube lines up to Twitter. The Lovell telescope at Jodrell Bank tweets what it’s pointing at (and it’s not alone). Tower Bridge lets us know when it’s opening and closing (and for what). The Heavens Above user updates Londoners with the times and directions of Iridium flares and International Space Station flybys over their city.

There are many more, and lots more will no doubt be added this year. Currently, most Twitter bots are one-directional. Things will get really interesting when more of them converse as well as simply report.

Further reading:

• In this post I’ve already linked to both Shaping Things by Bruce Sterling (and the 2004 SIGGRAPH speech), as well as Julian Bleecker’s ‘Manifesto for Networked Objects — Cohabiting with Pigeons, Arphids and Aibos in the Internet of Things‘ essay.
• Everyware by Adam Greenfield is relevant, though it deals mainly with the near-term. Andy Piper has a review which you might find helpful.
• OpenSpime is a project to enable “individuals and corporations to better understand their environment, through the use of a series of GPS-enabled sensors”. Read Tish Shute’s introduction on UgoTrade too.

• Polaroid Digital Mobile Photo Printer (Zink) - Oooh. Zink (zero ink) technology. The colour lives in the paper. [See also here.]
• Song Chart Meme - a set on Flickr - Wonderful series of charts which represent song lyrics.
• Virtual Worlds News: Disney’s Virtual Magic Kingdom to Close Doors - Read the comments for a glimpse of some passionate and dissapointed users. [via:waxy]
• FT.com: BBC chief quits to launch online service - Ashley Highfield has left the BBC to become chief exec of Kangaroo.
• Infochimps.org: Free Redistributable Rich Data Sets - “The infochimps.org community is assembling and interconnecting the world’s best repository for raw data — a sort of giant free almanac, with tables on everything you can put in a table.”
• The DEFINITIVE guide to Airline WiFi and Internet Access - In-flight wifi. It’s getting there.
• Aviary - Creation on the Fly - I like this a lot. Phoenix is an image editing tool (think: Photoshop on the web) while Peacock is a visual algorthmic patten generator (think: pipes for images). Lots lots more tools yet to be launched. Aviary is also a community. I have 5 invites.
• Musical Arduino - Aduino acting as a MIDI controller (sending serial data at 31,250bps, no computer required). I love the piezo elements as velocity-sensitive electricronic drums. Way cool.
• Whomwah.com » Blog Archive » More fun with QR Codes and the BBC logo - bbc.co.uk/programmes as a QRCode containing the BBC logo. Nice

• Create a Google Talk chatback badge - Handy. Not sure I want to use it, but handy.
• KnowledgeBoard - ‘IBM gambles on a shift from the KM model’ - “the decentralising impact of Web 2.0 calls for a new approach, or what the big blue calls ‘knowledge sharing’”
• Baekdal.com: Lenovo X300 is Not a Cool Computer - Amusing stuff: “this post is a rant against ThinkPad’s design”… “ThinkPad computers are not ‘cool’ and certainly not something that should be associated with design. They are - all of them - hideous pieces of junk”

• Profilactic.com - preventing an online identity crisis - “Profilactic is a social media aggregator that pulls in just about everything you and your friends create online.” Like friendfeed, but perhaps more so.
• jklabs :: EasyOsc - “EasyOsc is a Java library for doing dead simple Open Sound Control communication.”
• Rethinking Strategy in Second Life (podcast) - “Linden Lab’s John Lester discusses the importance of being an interdisciplinary company, and how other companies and communities must recreate themselves and their perspectives when using virtual worlds like Second Life.”
• NMC Launches Open Virtual Worlds Project - “New Media Consortium (NMC) announced a $250,000 two-year collaboration with Sun Microsystems to launch the Open Virtual Worlds Project, an effort that is aimed at making it easier to learn, work, and exchange ideas in virtual space.”
• Twitter / towerbridge - A twitterbot for Tower Bridge. I’d stopped collecting these, but I like this one a lot.

Three different physics games I’ve been enjoying recently. You might like them too.

1 - Toribash (Mac, Windows) is my favourite fighting game ever. The physics, rendering and tense multiplayer action make it an instant addiction.

2 - Crayon Physics (Windows) is the freeware prototype of something which went on to become the eagerly awaited Crayon Physics Deluxe (the one shown in the video below).

3 - Phun (Windows and Linux) is a fun 2D physics playground. Experiment with gravity, friction, springs, motors, and more. It looks a bit like this

It seems to be inspired by the MIT Magic Paper demo (shown in the video below).

• guardian.co.uk: All this online sharing has to stop - “But, um, music people? Better form an orderly queue. You think you were the first to suffer from your content getting ripped off and spread to the four corners of the earth? Get to the back of the line, bud. There’s a few people ahead of you.”
• Comment is free: Backpackers, bullies and internet myths - “as the case of Max Gogarty shows, there is no presumption of civility or community spirit online” what rot. It’s at least partly due to the space. Commentisfree doesn’t feel like a blog. It’s a post connected to an anymous forum, of course there’s flame.
• BBC NEWS: Brain control headset for gamers - “A neuro-headset which interprets the interaction of neurons in the brain will go on sale later this year.” “Emotiv is working with IBM to develop the technology for uses in ’strategic enterprise business markets and virtual worlds’”
• MMO Economies discussion on Metafilter - Talks about Bartle, Castranova and more. [via:arthur, via:boingboing]
• Flickr: Rodchenko Hayward Photography Competition - bird’s eye or worm’s eye views - “The most recent posts will be pulled through onto our website each day and on the 1 April Ralph Rugoff, Director of The Hayward, will select 10 winning photographs to be exhibited in the foyer of The Hayward from 14 ? 27 April” [via:russell]
• TV Licensing - TV Detector Vans - “Our vans feature a range of detection tools”. A database of licensed properties and an A-Z is presumably an important tool.

• Dion Almaer’s Blog: Gears Future APIs - Notification API - “One of the missing links is between the browser and the system tray and notification system.” “Growl for the web”
• Social Networking and Opportunities in the Public Sector - report commissioned by IBM - “Social networking can help public sector bodies interact to a far greater extent with citizens as well as with internal and external resources.” Perhaps ‘resources’ is supposed to mean more than just people here.
• BBC ‘NEWS’: The etiquette of networking - BBC’s tech journalism at its finest. Rory Cellan-Jones asks his wife, friends and colleagues what they reckon about the trials of social networking. [Sigh]
• BBC NEWS | Business | Facebook ’sees decline in users’ - “…one month of falling audiences doesn’t spell the decline of Facebook or social networking…” Alex Burmaster from Nielson needs to stop thinking of social networking participants as “audiences”, for a start.
• garfield minus garfield - “Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolor disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life? ” [via:gilest]